A massive technical post by @sickill - setting up fresh #ubuntu server for #ruby on #rails

You have many options for setting up Linux servers. Amongst the most popular ones are Chef and Puppet . Various hosting provider also add their own solutions for provisioning boxes (like Stackscripts on Linode ). Or you can do it “the old-school way”, manually. If you don’t need multiple machines and/or you have just a simple Rails site then provisioning tools might be an overkill. Also I believe any Ruby developer should configure production server from scratch at least once to get familiar with this stuff and to learn where to look when troubleshooting server side problems.